I hope you're ready for something gross and kind of disturbing because I'm about to take that old adage about not airing your dirty laundry and dropkick it into the great beyond. I am about to literally air my dirty laundry, is what I'm saying. It's not going to be pretty, but it is going to be satisfying—and maybe it'll even be helpful.

If I ever have the time and the inclination, one of the things I think I could make a pretty kickass stab at writing is a hard-hitting dissertation examining the opening statements made by each and every one of the women in the Real Housewives franchise.

I've worked behind pub counters in touristy parts of London, for toupéed men in gropey bars, and—for the summer between my first and second years in college, mostly because they were the only store to call me back after I'd carpet-bombed the mall with applications—for the local Abercrombie & Fitch, where my superlative skills in sweater-folding were eclipsed only by my impressive ability to smile politely as bored 15-year-olds charged $500 in whiskered denim to Daddy's American Express without so much as removing the straw for the TCBY Frappé&nbs

Look, sometimes I want to get all deep and serious with my complicated feelings about the inevitable passage of time, and sometimes I just want to talk about nail polish, if that's okay with you. Today is a nail polish day and I have some important, pressing news about it: I have found the perfect one.

Before I tell you the story I'm about to tell you, I feel it's important to preface it with a piece of information that you might find shocking. Or maybe laughable. Or maybe a bit shocking and also a bit laughable, but here it is anyway: I believe in ghosts.

This has happened unwittingly and against my better judgment but I have somehow become a person who says, with a straight face—or with the equivalent of a straight face when one is communicating via IM—"I'm really into banjos right now."

Of all the things that I'd anticipated might be an impediment to my enjoyment of working out first thing in the morning, crying my way through the previous night's Olympic coverage while stuck on a treadmill wasn't one. But the Today Show was playing a reel of Olympic parents watching their kids winning and I didn't have the remote for the overhead TV, so what do you expect? I'm not made of stone!

I haven't had a Diet Coke in a couple of weeks. I wish I could say that I had an epiphany about the chemicals I was putting in my body and decided to drink only local organic mineral water collected in rainbarrels by Trappist monks, but really what happened is that we just ran out of Diet Coke and I never got around to buying any more.